What shell am I running?

Whether you’ve got an interactive shell session, or are writing a shell script, it is very difficult to be certain. It’s better to check for the capabilities that you require.

If you find yourself in a shell session, but don’t know what type of shell it is, there are a few ways to find out whether it’s Bourne shell, Bash, ksh, csh, zsh, tcsh, or whatever.

The simple answer is that you type in the command

echo $SHELL

which should tell you the path to your current shell; if it’s /bin/ksh or /usr/bin/ksh then it’s the KornShell; if it’s /bin/csh then it’s the C shell, and so on.

However, it’s not always that simple; Bash will set $SHELL only if it was not already set, so if you were running csh and use that to call bash, then Bash’s $SHELL will still say csh, not bash. However, Bash will set the $BASH_VERSION variable, but that’s not really a guarantee that you have that version; it only tells you that there exists a variable which specifies that version. You may not even be running bash at all.

But there may be many entries containing the text “steve”, and you could be using NIS, LDAP, AD or some other authentication mechanism. $UID should be a read-only variable containing your UserID, and you can search your system-specific passwd via the getent command:

However, as my UID is 1000, this would match any line containing “1000” such as an account called “HAL1000″. So this should be one way to get your shell:

$ getent passwd $UID | cut -d: -f3,7|grep "^${UID}:"
1000:/bin/bash
$

Still, you could have run another shell after picking up your default shell. You can always check $0 – that should tell you how your current shell was called. You don’t know what the $PATH variable was when that was called – if $0 says “/usr/bin/zsh” then that’s what was called (of course, it is possible that/usr/bin/zsh could have changed since your shell was invoked!). If it just says “sh” then it’s whatever “sh” was found first in the $PATH of the calling shell. And of course, you can’t find out for sure what state that shell was in at that time.

On a Linux system, “cat /proc/$$/cmdline” should also give a good clue; “ls -l /proc/$$/exe” is better (but not definitive; it may be marked “(deleted)” if it’s been deleted, so you should check if it’s been subsequently replaced by some other shell.

So – it depends why you need to know. If you need to know for sure, on an unknown system, exactly what shell you are in, then I’m sorry, it’s not possible to be absolutely certain. To be reasonably confident, check $SHELL or $0. If you need to be more certain than that, then check for the features you require.

If you’re writing a shell script which requires arrays, then define and access an array, check that the results are as expected, and if not, bail out with a message along the lines of “an array-capable shell is expected – we suggest bash or ksh”.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2012 at 11:58 pm and is filed under faq. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.